Sprint 1 review and Sprint 2 planning 18th May 2015

Summary:

17.00 – 17.30 Sprint Review of Sprint 1– what have we produced this sprint?

Team Green:
Marie-Louise has visited one of the local departments of KBHFF to try the onboarding experience as a new member and see how the existing systems works in practice. She has written up her observations on Pivotal Tracker, and created a series of new user stories.

Team Blue:
Paweł presented the current version of the system, including the implementation of the user stories for administrator login and creation of new memberships. You can check out the system as it currently is set up here: http://socialsquare-foodnet.herokuapp.com/
(you can find login details on our #general Slack channel).

Paweł also presented the database structure as it is right now. See auto-generated map of database entities here. We need to make a standard definitions of the names of the entities in the database. This is a task for the coming sprint. It’s also been great to see how other developers from the Blue Team have done code reviews and helped improve and clarify the code base so far.

17.30 – 18.30 Sprint retrospective – How can we improve the way we work together based on our experiences in the past sprint?
– what was good this sprint?
– what was not that good?
– How can we improve?

Good:

Good to visit the local department of KBHFF

Good to see so many people interested in the project from the start.

Fun project to be part of.

Good to meet, to have an open and friendly dialogue and atmosphere between the teams about the development of the platform.

We still managed to deliver something, even though we didn’t have a clear set of user stories.

Slack has been working quite well. Pretty easy to use.

Not good

Even though many people are interested, few have actively engaged with the project so far

Speaking English may be a barrier when discussing complicated issues (for non-native speakers).

Difficult to understand the user story format, need more of an overview of what needs to be done and to understand the system in its entirety.

It’s a difficult to contribute because there hasn’t been enough concrete tasks to act on for the Green Team. The work method has been a little unfocused and undefined so far. It’s difficult to see where and how to start.

Maybe the current working processes are too complicated to get people involved. Too many different systems to use and follow (Not just Slack and Pivotal, but also GitHub, the project website and the wiki for meetings. And now we’ll also have the deployed product site).

Lack of connection between the user stories in Pivotal and the code base. Developers aren’t familiar with Pivotal, and prefer tickets in GitHub.

Not enough communication on Slack. Hopefully it will come as people get to know another the more they work together.

Improve

Once a user story is ready and prioritized for a given sprint, it should be created as a ticket in GitHub that developers can access and work on. All description and discussion regarding that user story should take place on Pivotal. Kræn will look into further integration between Github and Pivotal.

Socialsquare employees can do more to define concrete tasks that they can invite volunteer developers to help with and work on. To make it easier for volunteers to get started.

Meeting and working together more in-person. Hack-days where both Blue and Green Teams are present.

Better overview of how the project is progressing, and how you can contribute. For instance by using labels and tags in Pivotal. We will make an introduction to Pivotal at the hack-a-thon.

Create mock-ups to have a shared understanding of we want to build. For instance mapping mock-ups to the specific epics. Goal: To create mock-ups to be presented and talk about at the backlog refinement meetings.

Make more decisions to help define the product, remembering that we can always change decisions again later on as we learn more.

Improve project website to include wiki pages and meeting summaries. For instance by setting up a MediaWiki site for the project [Andreas will set this as a task]

19.00 – 20.30 Sprint planning
We defined and estimated new user stories for Sprint 2 for both Green and Blue Teams. Check the sprint backlog items on Pivotal and the tickets on GitHub (Kræn will add them ASAP). 🙂